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Friday, 20 May 2011

Mobile phones may be about to replace smart cards for card payments, avoiding the need to carry a wallet full of plastic cards as well as a mobile phone.

The next generation of mobile phones may be equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) contactless communication technology incorporated into their removable SIM cards. Since a SIM card is issued to a user by a network operator, it can be used to identify a mobile phone's user. As an interim measure, phones may be provided with RFID tags to perform a similar function.

You don't need your own OCR software to try this out. Use the search engine criterion "online ocr", to find a number of free websites to which you can upload a scanned image of some text.

If you have no access to a scanner, you can still generate your own test image by entering some text in presentation software such as Open Office Impress or Microsoft PowerPoint. You can then export or save the file in JPG or other image format.

For an interesting example of the use of touchscreen concept keyboards, you could take a look at www.omniqare.co.uk/iQare/. My mother could really benefit from such a user-friendly computer, except that she is blind.

How could we design similar computers for people who have visual impairments?

Sunday, 20 February 2011

Did you know that there was a keyboard shortcut for performing this switch? This is particularly useful when you need to prepare screenshot evidence of what you have built for coursework.

In both Open Office Calc and Microsoft Excel, you simply type Ctrl+`

But what do you call the ` key? and where do you find it? Its official name is the backquote but, unsure what it was called, at least one school in Cambridgeshire in the UK has given it the name "Gary". Perhaps you could give it a local name, too.